In wireless mobile communications, today's mobility management schemes generally make use of a hierarchy of tunnels from a relatively fixed anchor point, through one or more intermediate nodes, to reach a mobile node's (MN's) current point of attachment. These schemes generally suffer from poor performance, poor scalability, and failure modes due to the centralization and statefulness of the anchor point(s). The Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) working group of the IETF is currently chartered to investigate alternative solutions that will provide greater performance, scalability, and robustness through the distribution of mobility anchors.
In a network implementing distributed mobility management, it has been agreed that MNs should exhibit agility in their use of Internet protocol (IP) addresses. That is, an MN should use an old address for ongoing socket connections, and use a new, locally-assigned address for new socket connections.